In modern creationism, blood-language (even more than a high view of scripture) determines whether evolution can be true. In One Blood, leading creationist Ken Ham finds evolution too bloody for a good God. A good God could hardly use predation, extinction, and death as a means. For Ham, blood sets humans at one with or apart from the “dumb beasts.” But Ham drafts too narrow an atonement, where the blood of Christ makes up only for sin. Blood must also mean solidarity. Uses Irenaeus, William Jennings Bryan, Marilyn Adams, Teilhard de Chardin, Sergei Bulgakov.

Chapter 4 chronicles how Walter Hines Page, a diplomatic novice when President Woodrow Wilson tapped him to head Embassy London, proved one of the pivotal actors in World War I. While Wilson - and most of his cabinet - strove to maintain American neutrality in this conflict, Page, virtually from the moment hostilities erupted, strained every nerve and sinew to bring Washington into the war on the side of the Allies, especially Britain. The White House and State Department were unresponsive to Page's entreaties for many months - indeed, he was frequently threatened with cashiering - but his relentless cannonade of cables, letters, and other forms of trans-Atlantic arm-twisting bore fruit when Wilson accepted the logic of the ambassador's main argument: that German domination of the Continent would pose an unacceptable menace to the Western Hemisphere. Wilson's famous proclamation to Congress that "the world must be made safe for democracy" was a virtual paraphrase of Page's correspondence. Many interwar American historians, among them Harry Elmer Barnes and C. Harley Grattan, considered U.S. entry into the so-called "Great War" a calamity and blamed Page for nudging America off the tightrope of neautrality. I argue that this charge - oft-belittled in the post-World War II period - was in fact largely correct, but that Page's insubordination was heroic rather than nefarious.

This article first appeared as a book chapter in the <italic>Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy</italic>, edited by David Boonin and published by Palgrave in 2018. I was tasked with finding a test case of freedom of speech and inquiry from the sciences, in the larger context of free speech issues as related to public policy and the law. I have already written extensively about evolution and creationism, most notably in my 1997 book <italic>Why People Believe Weird Things</italic> and my 2006 book <italic>Why Darwin Matters</italic>, so here I engage the creationist movement as a free speech issue inasmuch as its proponents hold a minority viewpoint as far as the scientific community is concerned. Nevertheless, I contend that they should be free to believe, teach (and preach) whatever they like about the origins and diversity of life, and that, in the well-trodden principle, sunlight is the best disinfectant (to which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis added “electric light the most efficient policeman”).